How to Reduce Your Cloud Bill

If your organization deploys instances and VMs on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure or Google Compute Engine, there will inevitably be a time when your finance department orders your team to “reduce cloud bill”. Although the finance department was likely overjoyed at the initial cost savings you achieved by deploying your instances and VMs in the cloud, the “reduce cloud bill” directive is a consequence of deploying them a little too enthusiastically for the people who have to pay the bill.

There are various ways to comply with the “reduce cloud bill” order. You could head over to your cloud provider´s website to compare the costs of different types or regions, or consider prepayment discounts. You could look at rightsizing tools to increase the cost-effectiveness of your deployment options. Alternatively, quick fixes to reduce your cloud bill could include asking your developers to switch off their non-production resources when they are not required, or reassigning teams to write scheduling scripts to do the same.

None of these solutions to comply with the “reduce cloud bill” order are entirely satisfactory. You may, for example, be required to pay years ahead to obtain a worthwhile discount, find that rightsizing tools are ineffective across multiple platforms, or spend more money writing and maintaining scripts than you save in cloud deployment costs. Furthermore, you will not have solved the core issue that prompted the instruction to “reduce cloud bill” – over-enthusiastic or unregulated deployment.

Take Back Control of the Cloud with ParkMyCloud

ParkMyCloud is a lightweight app that helps organizations reduce their cloud bill, improve the governance of their Amazon, Microsoft and Google accounts, and take back control of the cloud. It provides a single view of all an organization´s accounts over multiple platforms, regions, types and pricing options, allows administrators to create team and role structures, and increases accountability to prevent the over-enthusiastic deployment of resources.

Using the single view dashboard, administrators can identify unused and underused resources to retire them or deploy them to a less expensive pricing plan. The option to create team and role structures enables administrators to order reports by team, user or credential in order to establish where the budget is being spent and also to provide accurate data for future project, capacity and budget planning. When additional resources are deployed on any cloud platform, they will appear in the reports.

Complying with the Order to “Reduce Cloud Bill”

To comply with the order to “reduce cloud bill”, on/off times can be scheduled for non-production resources – typically those used for development, testing and staging. In most organizations, access to non-production resources is only required for a maximum of sixty hours per week. So, for the remaining 108 hours per week, these could be “parked” to save organizations nearly 65% of the cost of deploying non-production resources on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine.

Complying with the directive to “reduce cloud bill” by parking non-production resources is easy. When administrators sign into the cloud platforms via ParkMyCloud, the app performs a “discovery” of the organization´s deployed resources and make recommendations about which ones are suitable for parking according to their types, names and tags. Administrators can accept the recommendations and create organization-wide policies to switch off non-production resources between (say) 8:00 p.m. and 8.00 a.m. and on weekends.

Alternatively, Let Your Development Teams Know They Are Accountable

Alternatively, the scheduling process can be performed by each development and testing team who, when they log into ParkMyCloud, will see a list of their assigned resources and the recommendations. Development teams can choose to apply a pre-configured parking schedule or create one of their own to suit their working hours. The schedules (and the organization-wide parking policies) can be “snoozed” if access to parked resources is required out of hours.

How much each team will be able to reduce its cloud bill by will depend on the number of non-production resources deployed on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine, their pricing plans and how long each resource is parked for. As soon as the parking schedules are set, projected savings over the next thirty days are displayed on the UI. Once the parking schedules are operating, the actual savings also appear on the UI – these figures also available to administrators.

Try ParkMyCloud and Take Back Control of the Cloud for Free

If you have been told to “reduce cloud bill” – or fear you might receive it soon – why not take advantage of a free trial of ParkMyCloud? Our free trial gives you the opportunity find out how easy it is to gain visibility of your cloud accounts, save money and take back control of the cloud. ParkMyCloud is easy to set up with no integrations or installations required and stops you paying for unused, underused and idle cloud resources.

At the end of the trial period, you have the options of continuing to use ParkMyCloud for free, or subscribing to a premium service with additional features. Typically, the premium service pays for itself within two months; so, whichever route you take, your finance department will be happy once again, and it will stop sending you orders to “reduce cloud bill”. You can try it today by clicking the “Try it Now” button or contact us for more information.